Erosion is a natural process in which meteorological elements such as rain, wind, and snow remove soil, rock, and dissolved material from one location on the Earth's crust and transport it to another location. Although erosion is a natural process, human activity may increase the rate at which erosion occurs in a localized area to many times the rate at which it would otherwise occur. For example, land surfaces adjacent man-made structures, such as the land adjacent roads, reservoirs, and artificially created waterways such as canals and drainage channels, are particularly susceptible to erosion because naturally occurring indigenous vegetation is removed in order to form the road shoulder, reservoir bank, canal bank, or drainage channel bank.
Erosion can be mitigated in these areas by remediation of the land surface adjacent the canal, road, or waterway by planting vegetation to replace the vegetation that was stripped away during construction of such man-made structures. However, there is a time interval between the planting of the replacement vegetation and the point at which the replacement vegetation is sufficiently dense and rooted to prevent further erosion of surface soil during which further erosion may occur.
Efforts have been made to retain the surface soil in place in these areas until such time as the replacement vegetation can mature to the point where the root structure and density of the replacement vegetation is sufficient to retain the surface soil in place. An example of such material is the flexible mat disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,793,858 titled “Method and Apparatus for Forming a Flexible Mat Defined by Interconnected Concrete Panels,” the entire contents of which are incorporated herein by reference. That patent discloses a flexible mat in the form of spaced, interconnected concrete panels or blocks held together by an open mesh of a polymeric material such as a geo-grid.
The flexible mat is made by depositing concrete into rows of mold cavities of a rotating drum and embedding an open-mesh geo-grid into the concrete material in the cavities. The rotating drum lays the geo-grid material, embedded into the concrete panels or blocks, in the form of a flexible, elongate mat, on a horizontal surface, such as the ground. When formed, the flexible mat of this construction may be 4 to 20 feet in width and over 5,000 feet in length for a single continuous run of material.
In order to transport the flexible mat to the location where it is to be installed, it is necessary to cut the flexible mat into shorter length mats and then roll the shorter length mats into compact, coiled rolls that are placed on the flat beds of trucks, or in the trailer of a tractor trailer rig, or in the bed of a pickup truck by telehandlers and transported to the location of installation. Because the shorter length mats are comprised of a grid arrangement of concrete panels or blocks, the coiled rolls can be very heavy and the process of forming the coiled rolls by rolling up the mat can be labor intensive.
Accordingly, there is a need for a device that will roll lengths of flexible mat material into coiled rolls in an efficient and safe manner with a minimum of manual labor required.